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Back from Old Trafford to find lots of comment spam on this weblog. Why on earth people bother to do this I really don't know but clearly, somewhere out there in the world, there are people paid a pittance to leave comments in tortured English promoting fake watches, drugs and worse on the off-chance that some reader would think: "That's a really good idea, I could really use some fake Viagra" and go online shopping! But people do and in large enough numbers to make it lucratively worthwhile for the sinister crime gangs that hide behind the shadowy anonymity of the Internet.

At Manchester United this morning after the big game the evening before and Wayne Rooney's future is the talk of the taxi drivers. I had the full ten minute lecture about the club, Beckham, Rooney, nightclubs, girls, you name it from a driver who has seen it all.

The area around the quays is vaguely Dubai like with brand new, modern buildings springing-up quickly enough to confuse the taxi dri…

The media, I see, I getting all excited by the inclusion of 'cyber-warfare' and the threat from 'cyber-terrorism' as a clear and present danger in the Strategic Defense Review.It's a topic I have some familiarity with – next stop Abu Dhabi around the same subject - and we all have good reason to be concerned as the internet groans under the weight of ever more increasingly sophisticated attacks from state and non-state actors.A couple of years ago I gave a lecture in Milan on what the Chinese were up to in terms of massive industrial espionage efforts against the largest European engineering companies such as Rolls Royce. On the Russian side, it's more a matter of organised crime, which can just as easily be switched to military use with an alleged nod from 'the right people' in their own state security apparatus; the cyber-attack in Estonia being a good example.It's not really the kind of thing that would worry us much, here on the north-eastern t…

Another party conference and endless hours of political analysis yet to come on both the BBC and Sky News, interspersed by footage of ducks swimming along the submerged fairways at the Ryder cup in Wales.

Now that 'Red Ed' has been put to bed – forgive the pun- It's David Cameron's turn with the Government's spending review now less than three weeks away. The recent IMF and CBI figures on economic growth give some room for optimism but the scale of public debt and the measures that are going to be necessary to reduce it, will fall on all our shoulders as its revealed the Government owes more than £1 trillion for the first time in its history.

I will remind readers that the former leader of Thanet's Labour group, described talk of a recession as "Complete tosh" and either a "Conservative invention" or "Something that the Conservatives should be familiar with." (It's not transparently clear which of these it was from the minutes…